Was this my last cookie? Was this the last time I’d hear Livin’ on a Prayer? And looking at this beautiful blonde that someone cut down like a sapling, I was wondering if this was my last corpse. And whether I had enough time to work out who messed with her. And make them sorry. ’Cause no-one’s more powerless than dead people. It might sound crazy, but dead people make me feel, well… protective.
Aldus crouched down again on the still-warm asphalt, poking lazily at the corpse. “Okay, so the find got rung in ‘bout twenty minutes ago. Coupla farm boys making their way over to the dirt wrestling. One of them stepped on her—”
He pointed matter-of-factly to the muddy size nine imprint on the white denim of her jeans. As he did, a quick buzz of electricity pinged me, making the hair on my arms stand to attention and a shiver of something no good chase scratchy fingers down my spine.
“Felt terrible, of course. Place is pretty busy tonight so she can’t have been here long.”
I looked around at Main Street. It was nine pm on a Saturday and even though something about the blue-gray quality of the darkness was tap-dancing on my danger radar for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down, I could only see three people on the entire street now the scene was cleared. Two were weaving drunkenly in our direction from The Dirty Boar. One was taking a leak against a sign: Welcome to Dirtwater – lotsa dirt, not so much water.
I tried to shake off the thick tendrils of trepidation that had stuck fast to my uniform and swivelled in a circle, raising an eyebrow at Aldus. Yeah, real busy.
“Okay, smartass. Busy for Dirtwater.” Aldus scrunched his smooth, full-moon face unhappily as he looked our blonde up and down again. She was lying outside the Dirtwater Convenience Store, the one that never opens after 4:30 pm, and one door down from the laundromat: Dirty Deeds. For the five millionth time in my life, I wondered why everything in this godforsaken town was named after dirt. Great way to attract sightseers.
The girl looked a few years younger than me, maybe 25. And she had the kind of beautiful, never-gonna-be-lined face used by anti-wrinkle cream companies to sell insecurity to fifty-year-old women. Her head lay slightly askew on her neck, an angle you’d never quite pull off alive. A trace of purple outlined her full lips. A pair of wild blue eyes stared upwards to infinity. And, because of what I am, I could smell it too. The smoky stench of death.
I crouched down and laid a hand on her forearm, expecting the usual chill but registering that she was even colder than I’d expected. Must have been here longer than we’d thought.
Looking at her, touching her, thinking about her deadness, my brain filled up, thinking about my responsibilities. I felt the sweat start to bead on my lip again and straightened up. Spots jangled in front of my eyes and the tendons at the back of my knees danced a mini hula. By the Goddess, only three weeks. Who was gonna take care of things when I was gone?
I took a deep breath and said it internally like the yogi taught me:
I embrace my fate and welcome each moment until my end.
“You still doin’ that hippy crap?” Aldus is deeply suspicious of meditation.
“You should try it sometime. Helps you find peace.”
“Whadda I need with peace?” He snorted in disgust. “And whadda you need with peace? Will it help you find a man? Pretty girl like you, goin’ on thirty. Saw this Oprah thing ‘bout these poor girls waited so long they had to freeze their e—”
“Aldus...”
“I’m just sayin’…”
“And I’m just not listening.”
Aldus started muttering under his breath as he stalked around the blonde, his dirty brown point-toed cowboy boots making crunchy noises on the road. “If the good Lord had meantcha to be peaceful, he wouldn’a made you Sicilian.”
He had a point. But you’ve got to find some way to manage the psychic burden of waiting to die. Young. And for me, stumbling into an Ashram in Goa after years of doing my best James Dean, meditation was it.
Aldus took up my previous position crouching by the blonde and ran one dirty finger through the pool of clear liquid she was lying in. “Still can’t work out what the hell she died of, or what this shit is.”
Jesus, talk about contaminating the crime scene. My boss